Thursday, January 17, 2013

TSA: What’s Left To Say?

My sincere apologies to you all; I haven’t updated this blog for a long while, plus one of my last posts mentioned my coming down with a fever over New Year’s and, long story short, I heard from a person or two wondering if I hadn’t died of some exotic flu strain.

Nope. The problem is more mundane and, arguably, more insidious: I just couldn’t think of anything to say. At least not anything I haven’t said already, and it’s not good for professional writers to get reputations for repetitiveness. Consider this shiny new news story from January 17, 2013: TSA’s so-called VIPR teams are slithering out of airports and into Amtrak stations.

And here’s something I wrote for the Guardian nine months earlier, on April 18, 2012, in protest of TSA raids on bus passengers:

No specific threats or reasons were cited for the raids, as the government no longer even pretends to need any. Vipers bite you just because they can. TSA spokesman Jim Fotenos confirmed this a few days before the Houston raids, when VIPR teams and local police did the same thing to travelers catching trains out of the Amtrak station in Alton, Illinois. Fotenos confirmed that "It was not in response to a specific threat," and bragged that VIPR teams conduct "thousands" of these operations each year.

Stroll with me further down Memory Lane and the view gets even more depressing. Here’s me on March 2011, optimistic and naïve enough to talk non-sarcastically about an anti-TSA “backlash,” and mention how VIPR teams had been banned from Amtrak after some particularly egregious mistreatment of train passengers in Savannah. So much for that.

Last November, TSA garnered outraged national headlines for a day or two after exposing a teenage girl’s breasts to her classmates during a typical groping. Untypically, the breasts in question belonged to a congressman’s close relative, so the congressman in question sputtered about it for a day or two, and then nothing happened.

And as I go through the TSA outrage stories in various archives, my professional columns and my personal blog posts here, the names and places and details differ but the pattern always remains the same: some monstrous misbehavior catches the nation’s attention, there is outraged sputtering for a day or two, then nothing happens.

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About Me

Jennifer Abel is an American writer who began her career in print media three minutes before the Internet killed the industry. After starting at a small Connecticut daily she moved to the Hartford Advocate, an alt-weekly where her journalistic coups included infiltrating a Furries convention and working on a phone sex line (which fired her six hours later). Since then she’s written for, or been reprinted in, dozens of print and web outlets, including Playboy, the Guardian, Salon, AlterNet, Mashable, the Daily Dot and pretty much every website with the words "cannabis" or "legalize it" in the title. Once, when she was young and naïve and needed the money, she unwittingly edited SEO copy for a spammer. However, in light of the spambot comments she’s deleted from her own blogs since then, she figures she’s more than repaid that particular karmic debt. Jennifer is currently looking for professional, non-spam writing jobs; interested editors are enthusiastically invited to e-mail her.